Who ate all the pies? The clear answer to that in Eagles history was one Scott Cummings. Though he only managed 46 games for the Eagles (the most he played at any club in his career), he was, for his period at the club the most prolific goalscorer in terms of goals per game (shading the great Peter Sumich by the second decimal place).

Cummings took a season to make his debut at Essendon, but shone brightly, kicking an amazing eight goals on debut. He showed flashes of that over the next two seasons before being traded to Port Adelaide. In his first season at Port, he managed a 70 goal season, but after two years he was on the trade table, the Eagles trading him in for the talented Jarrad Schofield.

In his first season at the Eagles, Cummings kicked 95 goals, leading the AFL and being the only West Coast player to ever win the Coleman Medal for the league's leading goalkicker. In an insult, he was overlooked for the All Australian team for Matthew Lloyd, as Lloyd supposedly had "more potential". True in hindsight, but that's not what the award recognises - it recognises the performances of that season, where Cummings was clearly the pre-eminent forward in the competition.

Cummings started 2000 in equally stellar form, kicking the club record 14 goals in a game against the Crowbots, and 10 a couple of weeks later against the Shockers (both in massive 100+ point victories) - but with 47 goals to his name mid-season, he was struck down with injury in round 12, to play only one more game for the season - it's notable that the Eagles slumped from 5th at the mid point of the season to finish 13th. After that he was a shadow of his former self, unable to really regain fitness and form, and was eventually a victim of the Eagles bad seasons in 2000/2001, being delisted.

He was given a brief run at Collingwood, but that only resulted in five games in his only season at the Filth.

Cummings was a natural forward, though of a sort that's unlikely to appear in football anymore. A big, burly marker, he had great goalsense, but in modern football he would be too unaccountable; his type of player, the big full forward is a lost part of the game from earlier eras - Cummings may be the very last of them to really shine.

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A lot
of thanks are due to other people for the stats on this
page. For all games from 1993-2002, thanks to Paul
at AFL Statshttp://stats.rleague.com/afl/afl_index.html.
For the 1987-1992 stats, much thanks to carneagles
for providing me a copy of the stats created for corkintheocean,
probably the best footy blog out there. Go read it!